User talk:ListGenBot/Enhancements

automated updating

I was thinking again about the fiddler-list-inspired bot (for those not involved in that discussion, see "fiddler bot" at Wikipedia:Bot requests). I'm still a little conflicted on whether to go with categories or not, but it got me looking again at ListGenBot. One thing jumps out as not being clear: will ListGenBot detect changes made to a {{ListGenBot-SourceStart|x}} and update all pages with {{ListGenBot-ListAlphabeticalStart|x}} to match the source? Having that feature would, I think, make the difference between this being a clever thing and an extremely useful thing. --Eitch 17:13, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes indeed, that's what it's all about - it regularly trolls all the pages including a 'ListGenBot-SourceStart' template and will regenerate any of the list sections on pages that have any of the 'ListGenBot-ListAlphabeticalStart' family of pages. So once it's running properly, if anyone updates an item in the source list, all the generates lists should be auto-updated a few minutes later.

I'd like to pump more features into this, including variations on the 'ListGenBot-ListAlphabeticalStart' type tags to specify generating lists in different formats (such as a list with no bullets) so very interested to hear how you might use it and what you'd like it to do.

At the moment, various people have expressed an interest in using ListGenBot but I have no concrete 'must have' users to 'sponsor' making it a permanent feature of wiki, so if you want to make use of it, please put a mention on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ListGenBot. I've no doubt once it gets going, lots of projects will find uses for it --Mortice 18:36, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

case-sensitive alphabetization and more

Alright! Congratulations on approval. I was just trying it out (User:Eitch/listgenbot sandbox3 as it looks at the time of this writing), and have a few comments (I hope these aren't too ridiculous - I've never worked with bots before, and without reading up on them I'm guessing they function in a way related to templates, which might be completely wrong)

1. Capitalization: Uppercase letters are listed before lowercase ones. What about having an "caps" parameter, in which you'd specify whether you want to see uppercase and lowercase mixed ("1"), uppercase first ("2"), or lower case first ("3").

2. More on alphabetization: It would be nice to have the option of listing the items in the sectioned lists alphabetically.

3. More on order generally: How about an "order" parameter where you could specify what oder you want to see characters, numbers, symbols, Greek, Cyrillic, and IPA in.

4. Bullets: I agree it would be nice to have the option of bullets or no bullets. But why stop there? How about a "linestart" parameter where you could enter whatever you wanted for each line to be started with (default would be "*" but I can see times where you might want ":" or " " or ":::" or even "here's one thing in this list:")

5. Titles: How about a "title" parameter? Instead of the

Colours I have an opinion about include:
{{ListGenBot-ListAlphabeticalStart|MyColours}}
{{ListGenBot-ListAlphabeticalEnd}}

you have on User:ListGenBot/Details, it would be {{ListGenBot-ListAlphabeticalStart|MyColours|title="Colours I have an opinion about :include:"}}

{{ListGenBot-ListAlphabeticalEnd}}

or something.

6. More on formatting: This is getting very needy, but I it would make it such a more versatile tool: What about optional parameters of title size, (in sectioned lists) a parameter for section header size (default to one size smaller than the title size), and list item indentation (or not indentation, as is '4') (in non-sectioned lists, this would be inserted in front of every item; in sectioned lists, it would be inserted in front of every section)

--Eitch 02:09, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for all the ideas. There are certainly lots of ways in which ListGenBot could process and reformat the data, but (since there would be a lot of work involved) I'd like to focus on changes for which there are needs from users, rather than good ideas. Hopefully over time it will develop into the sort of thing you're talking about.

1 - Yes, you're right, the sorting should be alphabetic case insensitive. I can see that numeric could be a requirement at some time, though probably not in most cases

2 - The logic is that sections on the original page have probably been crafted intentionally to have a certain order, so in most cases it would be more desirable to keep the order

5 - This is interesting - you'd have to specify an alternative title in the source tag, which would then get used in the section list. In the Simpsons episode list, in most cases the section title is the episode title, but one is called "Some Enchanted Evening (The Simpsons episode)" which would be better called "Some Enchanted Evening"

I've added some of these to the User:ListGenBot/Enhancements list - if you would find any of the others of particular value for your project, let me know and I'll juggle the priorities --Mortice 12:41, 13 December 2006 (UTC)